Today’s diatribe is all base upon coverage of China in The Weekend Australian, April 3-4, 2021. First, China and Russia, it is alleged, are trying to throw a spanner in the works of the magical vax rollout. That is truly shocking, because regardless of the blood clot issue, getting a vax is going to be one’s passport to existence, e.g. vaccine passports, maybe even getting a beer at a pub, as in the UK. Already, I spend most of my spare time getting Covid tests, sometimes from people on the street busking, so I will be ready for the jabs. But, let’s not be too silly because China’s biological warfare programs could kill millions. Read on.
“China and Russia are overtly and covertly trying to undermine the COVID-19 vaccination rollout in Western countries, like Australia.
Their aim is to prolong the chaos caused by the virus, undermine confidence in governments, promote their own vaccines as a diplomatic tool and even steal research, cybersecurity experts claim.
Australian researcher Ariel Bogle, who studied social media posts on vaccines, was stunned at extent of disinformation — including the panning of our jab suppliers.
Some colleagues of mine in 2020 looked at some efforts, apparently by Russia-linked actors undermining the AstraZeneca vaccine and so, in January, we noticed this uptick in discussion of the Pfizer vaccine so we took a closer look,” she said.
“It became pretty clear … as various vaccine candidates emerged that they would become a kind of political tool, as well as a health tool, as a way to kind of broadcast scientific achievement for their country.”
Ms Bogle cited the example of a tweet by a reporter for China’s state-owned broadcaster CGTN, who dramatised reports Norwegian aged care residents died after receiving the Pfizer vaccine, asking whether European media had picked up the story.
“Not that I can see,” the reporter tweeted. “Imagine if 13 people are assessed to have died from Chinese-made #vaccines, it would have made headlines EVERYWHERE!”
The reporter then tweeted two screenshots of headlines about 10 potential Pfizer vaccine-linked deaths in Germany — overlooking that they may have passed away from national causes and that 800,000 others had been successfully vaccinated.
“Both tweets were retweeted by Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, who has more than 877,000 followers,” Ms Bogle, of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said.”
Don’t worry about the blood clot issue, maybe I should not have raised it?
“Australia’s medicines regulator has launched an investigation into a probable link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and a 44-year-old man who was hospitalised with blood clots more than a week after receiving the dose.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration was in urgent discussions on Friday with its British counterpart after the Melbourne man was hospitalised with low blood platelets, a symptom of internal bleeding, which mirrored a series of European cases.
Acting chief medical officer Michael Kidd said: “We are taking this potential risk very seriously.”
Britain has reported 22 cases of the rare condition cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) following vaccination with AstraZeneca, and eight reports of other thrombosis events with low platelets, out of a total of 18.1 million vaccines administered.
The Australian Health Protection Principal Committee will on Saturday consider advice formulated late on Friday by the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation in response to the Melbourne case.
While a causal link between the syndrome and vaccination has not been established, the Australian government has advised doctors to be on alert for the warning signs of thrombosis and low platelet count. Any patients suspected of having the rare but severe condition should be referred to an emergency department for urgent assessment and haematology consultation.”
But the real kicker is an exclusive interview between Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and Greg Sheridan, entitled, “Covid ‘Just China’s First Virus Threat.’” Pompeo holds back no punches on the China threat, maintaining that the Covid virus most likely came from the Wuhan lab. This is but the first threat from China’s biological warfare programs:
“The world faces new pandemic outbreaks at least as deadly as COVID-19 because of the continued biological weapons research being undertaken in Chinese laboratories, Donald Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo has declared.
“The Chinese Communist Party continues to engage in this sort of biological research,” Mr Pompeo told The Weekend Australian in a wide-ranging interview.
“The risk of this sort of thing happening again from a Chinese facility is real and significant.
“We can see in the millions of lives lost and the billions of dollars of wealth that’s been destroyed, the world must make sure that this does not happen again.”
Mr Pompeo believes that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan laboratory, but that it was not released intentionally by Chinese authorities.
“I am highly confident the virus began in Wuhan, China,” he said. “I am reasonably confident it came from the (Wuhan Institute of Virology) laboratory. I am less certain of that and the CCP has diligently tried to make sure we never know. But the weight of evidence suggests it likely came from that laboratory.”
Mr Pompeo is unimpressed by the joint World Health Organisation/China investigation into the origins of the virus and said Beijing stood condemned for its cover-up.
“We still don’t know who patient zero was,” he said. “We still haven’t seen the original strain. We still haven’t interviewed the doctors that were working in the laboratory.
“The central moment that the Chinese knew they had a virulent virus that was human-to-human transmissible, their choice was to lock down Wuhan and to lock down the world from understanding the risk that was presented to it. That cover-up alone, regardless of where the virus actually began, is something the CCP must be held to account for.”
Before he became secretary of state in 2017, Mr Pompeo was CIA director; before that he was a member of the congressional intelligence committee. He endorsed recent remarks by US Indo-Pacific commander Philip Davidson that Beijing could launch military action against Taiwan in the next few years.
“In my time in service I saw the Chinese actions and the intelligence we had about their intentions,” Mr Pompeo said.
“The reunification of Taiwan is something they are intent upon. The means that they will use are likely to be coercive at the front end and military at the back end, only when necessary.”
Mr Pompeo believes the best way to avoid conflict and safeguard regional democracies is for the US and its allies to make clear to Beijing that military action against Taiwan would come at an enormous cost.
Mr Pompeo sees the Quadrilateral Dialogue, involving the US, Australia, Japan and India, as critical in resisting Chinese domination. “These are four great friends,” he said. “They are real democracies, with all the noise and hubbub that comes with that, but they are real democracies working every day to make their countries great.”
Mr Pompeo said the chief method of coercion Beijing employed was economic power, citing recent trade actions against Australia as an example. But the Quad nations between them were powerful enough to resist such coercion, he said.
“We four represent a very significant piece of the economic activity between free and open societies. We should do our best to get rid of tariffs on each other, make sure we have as open and free arrangements between our countries as we can, and demand that other countries participate on the basis of those same rules.”
However, Mr Pompeo believes the US and its allies, including Australia, are not acting with sufficient vigour in the hi-tech competition with Beijing.
“We are not doing enough, not nearly enough,” he said.
Hi-tech fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, blockchain and a few others would be the “commanding heights of the next generation” whereas in the past they were resources such as oil. “We must make sure the technology of the future is democratic technology and not totalitarian technology,” he said.
“The Chinese Communist Party deeply believes their Marxist/Leninist ideology is the right ideology for the world, and they attempt to impose that ideology everywhere. Their intentions are to undermine democracy.”
He is more critical of the Biden administration in its weakening of US policy towards Iran, and cites the recent China-Iran economic agreement as a dangerous development.
“The Chinese need oil and the Iranians need money and weapons systems,” he said.
Because of the Biden administration’s weakening of US sanctions on Iran, Mr Pompeo said Tehran now faced almost no limitations on the weapons systems it could acquire.
“You will see increased trafficking in arms systems,” he said.
“The Iranians have the capacity to build some of these on their own. But Chinese cyber capabilities, Chinese missile technology, all the things the Chinese have been working on these last 25 years are now likely to find their way to an ayatollah who will use them to destabilise the Middle East. It’s a really negative outcome to see China and Iran working so closely together.””
Well, there it is in the local rag, sorry, leading national newspaper, some of the thoughts we here have expressed in the last few years. We have been warned!